When you catch the smell

It takes about one second. Someone passes you on the pavement, a door opens, the wind shifts, and before you have decided anything your whole body has already answered. That is not weakness and it is not appetite. Smell is wired straight into memory, closer to it than any other sense, so what reached you was not a want but a rerun: a particular corner, a particular hour, the person you were then. The wanting came dressed as the past, which is why it landed before you could get a word in.

So change the air you are breathing. Move first and think second, which is the reverse of your instinct. Cross the road, step round the corner, go inside, turn your face into the wind. Ten steps is usually enough. If you cannot move, put something else in your nose on purpose: coffee, mint, soap, an orange, the collar of your own shirt. You are not resisting the smell. You are replacing it, and a nose that is busy with something present stops broadcasting something old.

Then give it thirty seconds, because that is roughly how long the flare needs to fall apart once nothing feeds it. And while you wait, refuse the conclusion your mind is about to draw. It will say: you still want it, after all this time. You do not. A door opened onto an old room and your nose looked in. Looking is not wanting. A memory arriving is not a vote you cast, and the fact that your body still holds the file proves only that you lived that life, not that you are living it now.

Half a minute later the street smells like a street again. Nothing happened, and nothing happening is the whole point: the link between that air and your hand got a little thinner while you were busy walking. God saw that one, the tiny unwitnessed turn nobody will ever ask you about. Thank Him for the nose that still remembers and the feet that went the other way. Tomorrow the same smell will reach you and mean less, because of what you did with thirty ordinary seconds.